My heart is a bird I caught by accident. A starling flew into my hand. I tried to let it go but it only flapped into my chest, where it preened and chirped its space laser song. I left the door open (it can leave anytime it wants) but instead of escaping it tells me all day long how much it loves me; it cheeps and chitters you are incredible over and over, its warbling code (dot dash, dot dash) so simple to decipher: please and thank you, call and response, shrink or grow bigger, seek or withdraw. For months and months, it’s fluttered and flitted and in this time I’ve learned a little about ornithology. First, that it’s not a starling—not only a starling: it’s a flock of pigeons, ratty and dumb; it’s a seaside gull, witless and greedy; it’s an Alabama silkie screaming into the rising sun; it’s a peregrine falcon falling silently from its perch on the forty-fifth floor of the Willis Tower not to hunt, not to kill, but for the joy it feels in the geometry of its flight and always, always, always my bird is ready, my bird watches, feathered head cocked, listening, having heard tell, having caught sight, having felt through the wide-open mesh of my spirit, my paper-thin and ancient skin, the sudden crunch of gravel on a driveway that leads to a fire, some new beauty, a gleaming Buick Skylark rolling slowly into a dry wicket, a word, a note, a glance that carries in its minuscule body a world of truth and a spark of love and my bird beats a wing and my bird lifts its head and my bird, my phoenix bursts into cinnamon and tangerine my face a murmuration of tears and my heart catches in its cage, wings beating faster to pump a salty truth: that I’m not a cage, I’m a chariot, a pagan parade float, a temple for the simplest fact, that love is everywhere and I get some and I give some and my heart, my feathered heart, is a bird.